21-09-22 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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needs to be redesigned and reauthorized to be a recycling or a reuse plant. We have a salt problem in our reclaimed water.Salt water intrusion is happening in the system. And the water has got too much chloride in it to be used in a wide variety of agronomic purposes. There are some salt-tolerant grasses, but that requires over-irrigation to manage the salts. And so the recommendation is that resources be directed to plug the leaks. We need to get our reclaimed water chloride concentration down to what it is for our drinking water. And it is significant in the drinking water, so any additional salt intrusion closes that option. And then lastly, when the water becomes available, it has to become available in the context of irrigating an agronomic crop. There are best management practices that need to be part of the plan. Just building sprinkler fields, and dumping water on them, such as what happens at Old Airport Park, just isn’t going to work. And then lastly, the legal liability that the continued use of the sump creates for the County is significant. Under the recent Supreme Court decision that discharge is not allowed because the County has no permit to discharge. And getting for our impaired oceans would be fundamentally impossible. And so this recommendation is part of an overall set of ideas that we need to do a much better job of managing our water resources if we are going to have a sustainable future. And there’s 1.8 million gallons of reclaimed water that can be made available very soon if we commit to a reuse policy. Motion and second: Vice Chair Gaffney made the following three-part motion, to which Commissioner Olson seconded: 1) specifically designate the Kealakehe WWTP as a Water Resource Recovery Facility and designate the plant as exclusively for the recycling of wastewater. 2) DEM should have the funding to resolve saltwater infiltration into the sewer system and also needs an enforcement ordinance which enables DEM to inspect and require repair by owners of private laterals found to be leaking. 3) Distribution and reuse of water should use agronomic principles for best management. Discussion: Commissioner Cardwell asked for an explanation of “agronomic principles.” Vice Chair Gaffney said theuse of the wastewatershould be done based on the kinds of practices that our golf course managers and major agricultural users of wastewater follow, of California in particular. So those principles are widely known in university systems and it is simply a matter of the County reaching out and asking for details to be necessary to be sure that this water is used to its maximum benefit to whatever it is being used for. As he had discussed before, one option is to pipe some of this water to the agricultural park at Kealakehe, and the people in the ag park will have to know how to use it, and that breaks down into sprinkler size, misting type, flow rates, that sort of thing. Bottom line is the science is solid because a lot of people are already using recycled water for other activities. There are people on the island who are very much aware of it because it is a big deal for all the resorts that have those recycling systems 20